The Biblical Saga of King David

by John Van Seters

The biblical story of King David has been interpreted in many different ways, arising from the variety of methods used in and the intended objectives of the studies: Does the narrative contain insight into and information about the early history of the Judean monarchy, or is it merely a legendary tale about a distant past? Can we identify the story’s literary genre, it sociohistorical setting, and the intention of its author(s)? Is an appreciation for the wonderful literary qualities of the story compatible with a literary-critical investigation of the narrative’s compositional and text-critical history? Van Seters reviews past scholarship on the David story and in the course of doing so unravels the history of these questions and then presents an extended appraisal of the debate about the social and historical context of the biblical story. From this critical foundation, Van Seters proceeds to offering a detailed literary analysis of the story of David from his rise to power under Saul to his ultimate succession by Solomon.

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

John Van Seters was a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Ancient Near East. Latterly University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He took his Ph.D. at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies (1965) and a Th.D. h.c. from the University of Lausanne (1999). His honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, and research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. His many publications include The Hyksos: A New Investigation (1966); Abraham in History and Tradition (1975); In Search of History (1983, for which he won the James H. Breasted Prize and the American Academy of Religion book award); The Edited Bible (2006); and The Biblical Saga of King David (2009).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Van Seters is one of the grand old men of Biblical minimalism - 88 years old (OK, only 79 or 80 when this came out), and here he continues his work of overturning standard Biblical scholarship. His verse-by-verse, sometimes clause-by-clause analysis of large parts of 1 and 2 Samuel is a bit too much for my limited attention span (a problem going back to the days when I took an OT intro course and was faced with microscopic dissections of Genesis in the service of the Documentary Hypothesis). But I was prepared to take his word for it, at least for the duration of the book, when he explained the web of literary dependences, rewrites and overlays that he finds in the text, because his conclusions are startling and seemingly plausible on easier-to-grasp grounds, such as anachronisms (especially the use of Greek mercenaries and David's early career as a bandit chieftain) that point toward the Persian era, and above all the apparent presence of two irreconcilable themes.

He believes that an original, Deuteronomistic layer, written well after the supposed events it recounts, invents the United Monarchy, links the Saul and David traditions and presents David as the archetype of the good king. A later, post-Exilic layer has an anti-David, anti-monarchical bias - and, with its unsparing portrayal of David's sins and misjudgments and (in 1 Kings) what amounts to a military coup by Solomon, is meant to undermine and even parody the original.

The standard approach is to see an "apologia" weighing the king's virtues against his flaws, but Van Seters sees two warring accounts. He calls layer No. 2 the David Saga as a parallel to the anonymous Icelandic sagas, "serious entertainment" that added fiction to a historical (or, in this case, "historical") source to make it "more vivid and realistic" and to "make a judgment about the nation's past and its appropriate expectations for the future." I doubt this is the scholarly consensus, though.